I still fantasize about having lisp "all the way down", but I'm not sure what I mean or ought to mean when I am fantasizing. On the one hand, I mean implementing lisp in hardware as fundamentally as possible (don't really know why this would be valuable, but I'm still drawn to it). On the other hand, I mean having lisp be the foundation at the software level (ie., the kernel and the rest of the OS; I can more easily see how this would be valuable).

Can someone here speak to the notion of a lisp machine in the future? Is there any chance this could happen? Would it be valuable? Does anybody else here have this same dream/fantasy/whatever-you-want-to-call-it?

(edited slightly for wording and clarity)

This isn't my itch, but some possible answers could include having hardware enforced type safety and architectural support for efficient execution. To give a rather extreme example of what is possible with a dedicated architecture, study the Reduceron [1,2]. IMO, doing something similar for Lisp would be much much easier.

Could it be done? Yes, absolutely and it would be great fun. You'd have to work with an FPGA though unless you have a sizable fortune to fab a chip (though 28nm is almost affordable).

[1] https://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/reduceron [2] https://github.com/tommythorn/Reduceron

PS: Reduceron has a hardware garbage collector